Episode 288: How to Turn Skills Intelligence Into Business Value
You’ve mapped your workforce’s skills. What changes in the decisions your organisation makes?
In this episode of the Digital HRLeaders podcast, David Green welcomes back Loïc Michel, co-founder and CEO of 365Talents, a Docebo company, to explore how organisations can connect skills intelligence, learning and workforce strategy.
From closing capability gaps to redeploying talent and reducing reliance on external contractors, they discuss what it takes to make skills data useful in everyday business decisions. They also explore how AI agents could change the work of HR, and why human judgement remains essential.
Join them as they discuss:
- Why learning and skills technology grew up separately, what bringing them together enables
- How to measure whether capability gaps are closing through a cycle of detecting, developing and assessing skills
- Why skills initiatives stall at the mapping stage, and how a clear business problem and committed leadership keep them moving
- How SNCF used skills intelligence to identify internal capabilities and reduce reliance on subcontractors
- Where AI agents can support learning and career development, and how to keep people in the lead on workforce decisions
- Why understanding skills and tasks is essential to preparing people for changing jobs and work shared with AI agents
This episode is sponsored by 365Talents, a Docebo company.
Every organisation approaches skills in its own way, so365Talents designs its talent intelligence solutions to adapt to how each business works. HR teams use them to put skills-based strategies into action more quickly and to see the impact across the whole organisation.
Find out more about 365Talents
Building or refining your skills strategy? The 2026 Skills Toolkit brings together 14 free HR templates covering every stage of the journey. It includes a business case built for your CFO, a structured framework for comparing vendors, a strategy you can take to the board, and practical tools for day-to-day HR operations and rollout.
Get free access to the 2026 Skills Toolkit
Resources:
365Talents newsletter
365Talentsskills resources
Docebo
This episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast is brought to you by 365 Talents.
[00:09] David Green: In the work we do at Insight222, the organisations getting the most value from their skills initiatives start with a clear business problem. They might need to redeploy people, reduce reliance on external contractors, or develop capabilities for work that AI is changing. But understanding the skills you have is only the beginning. The real test is whether that information helps people make better decisions and whether the capability gaps you've identified actually close. That can be difficult when learning, talent and workforce planning invariably sit in different parts of HR, each with its own priorities, budgets and systems. An employee's development needs don't necessarily fit neatly into those boundaries, and neither do the business problems we're trying to solve.
Returning to the show today is Loïc Michel, co-founder and CEO of 365Talents, which has this year become part of Docebo. Bringing skills intelligence and learning together is central to their plans, and we explore what that combination could mean for organisations and their people. We discuss how to move from identifying capabilities to using them in decisions about learning, mobility, staffing, and workforce planning. And, of course, we spend time on AI, where agents can help connect skills data with action, why people need to remain in the lead when making workforce decisions, and how organisations can balance experimentation with responsible governance. Finally, we look ahead to what happens when workforce planning needs to account for tasks performed by both people and AI agents, and what that means for preparing employees for jobs that haven't yet been defined. There's plenty here for HR, people analytics, talent and learning leaders, so without further ado, let's get into the conversation with a brief introduction from Loïc himself.
Loïc, welcome back to the Digital HR Leaders podcast. It's 18 months since our last conversations, but for listeners who haven't heard that previous conversation or know you or 365Talents well, can you briefly introduce yourself, your role at 365Talents, and the work you're doing with organisations today?
[02:30] Loïc Michel: Sure, so I'm really happy to be here. I'm Loïc, co-founder and CEO at 365Talents. I've been in the skills space forever. And when I created the company with my two co-founders back in 2015, we were just the first to talk about how to leverage skills data at scale in large organisations, and what to do with that data. So, that was just the foundations of what is now a space and its skills intelligence. And with that, we help large organisations turn into skills-based organisations to leverage all the skills data they have, create common language around skills, and put that in motion with critical talent use cases on mobility, staffing of projects, on career development, career pathing, upskilling and reskilling, workforce planning, many, many others.
[03:29] David Green: Well, it's great to have you back, Loïc. And you and your co-founders and some of the other pioneers in this space have really helped create the skills space within our field. And obviously, it's grown quite significantly since you started off in 2015. And a lot has happened since we spoke 18 months ago, including 365Talents becoming part of Docebo. What was the thinking behind the combination? And what does bringing skills intelligence and learning together enable that was maybe harder to do when they're separate parts?
[04:03] Loïc Michel: For such a story to happen, you need two thinkings that joined and that are compatible. So, our thinking was skills intelligence and talent experience are always connected to upskilling and reskilling. And who is owning upskilling and reskilling if not the learning space? I was always amazed by the fact that skills intelligence was not in the LMS or the L&D scope, but somewhere else, more attached to talent, while the upskilling and reskilling is exactly on the table of the learning experts and learning leaders. So, that was our vision, how to combine forces with a company in the field that makes sense. And we could have joined forces in the recruitment space or in the learning space there where the two options. First, we wanted to scale internationally, particularly in North America. We knew that's where we would thrive. And that was a good moment for us. Good moment, good market and good partner. I will explain that later, but the nice and smart people, I would say, with a really strong opinion and vision on what skills can bring to the table, a really neat project with 365Talents, expertise and capabilities and products and go to market. And so, all of that made a really good recipe.
On the other side, for a learning platform like Docebo to invest in the skill space, it was a big bet, and the bet was learning by itself is not enough; skills and talent is another area, it's another addressable market, it's a set of other personas and buyers, more VP talent, CHRO. And Alessio, the CEO at Docebo, really wanted to jump into that market and seize that opportunity. So, for him, he wanted Docebo to be a multiple-product company, and the second product they wanted to invest on was skills and talent. So, it was a really good date, a really good wedding, and the marriage so far is really good as well. And it made a lot of sense for both parties, so everything is really legitimate.
[06:31] David Green: Yeah, it certainly makes a lot of sense, I think. And I know when you came together in the announcement that was made earlier this year, I think the analyst market was very favourable about 365Talents and Docebo coming together. So, exciting times. And it is interesting, isn't it, how we've built up HR over the years, not just from a technology perspective, but the way we set up HR to be very silo-oriented. And you're right, learning and talent and skills, clearly they belong together. But that hasn't been the historical case. Learning technology and skills technology, as we've said, they've largely grown up as separate categories, but they're still serving the same workforce. It's about developing your internal talent. Why do you think that separation persisted for so long? And why is it, or was it, in your case and Docebo's case, why is it becoming increasingly difficult to justify?
[07:34] Loïc Michel: From a product vision perspective, the ambition and the strategy we have with Docebo is to provide a workforce-readiness platform, unified for any organisation. So, it's connecting these two worlds and the fluid and the essential element at the centre is skills data, but it's also AI and agentic capabilities and knowledge is on top of that. So, it's a really comprehensive vision. But yes, you're right, this vision and these markets and these solutions were managed by different leaders with different budgets, different timelines, different agendas, different events, different people doing things, different roles, different responsibilities. I've never understood why. But I think it's going to disappear progressively. And I would say, first, because of budget and efficiency constraints, you know, the world is full of constraints, the economy is not booming everywhere, everybody needs to run with less resources and less to invest on AI, but that's another story. So, budget and efficiency constraints are all over the place. So, a smart CHRO, CFO would say, "Hey, why do we pay a million here and a million there? Couldn't we have a, I don't know, 1.5 million in the middle solution that delivers exactly what we want to achieve with a more seamless experience for everybody?" And the answer is yes.
On top of that, I think there are technical expectations about integrations interoperability. Nobody wants to see two different systems. So, we're not talking about finance, but just really UX-wise, even data-administration-wise, it doesn't make a lot of sense. And on top of that, you have AI, agentic AI coming with a new approach on the UX, and everybody's imagining an agentic AI layer on top of everything. And an employee doesn't want to have an AI coach for learning on one hand and another exactly looking the same to do something else. Everything has to be in the same place. So, I think budget interoperability constraints. And now, this agentic layer will progressively make these two worlds converge and merge, and that's exactly the vision we have with the Docebo.
[10:20] David Green: This episode is sponsored by 365Talents, a Docebo company. 365Talents takes a flexible, tailored approach to skills and talent management because no two businesses are the same. Their adaptive talent intelligence solutions empower HR teams to move faster, build skills-based strategies. And deliver real impact at scale. Want to learn more? Visit 365Talents.com. And don't forget to explore the complete 2026 Skills Toolkit, 14 HR templates spanning the full skills journey from the CFO-ready business case through structured vendor evaluation, board ready strategy, daily HR ops, and rollout. Head over to the show notes and get your free access today.
You're eight, nine months now into the new company with Docebo. What changes when organisations connect the two, and maybe can you share an example of a customer that has moved from understanding its skills gaps to actually closing them through learning, mobility, or redeployment, or a mixture of all three?
[11:45] Loïc Michel: Yeah, the fun fact is we already had customers in common who had, I don't know, maybe they felt it. They knew that there was something good connecting these two solutions together, but Infinite Campus in the US, Veolia in France, they made a separate choice to have Docebo for learning, and 365 for skills and talent. So, lucky them, because after a couple of months, everything was running really smoothly together, and the roadmap for even more greatness in the seamless experience is massive and is really impressive. So, I cannot tell you what they are achieving right now, it's pretty fresh. But it's obvious that connecting the dots between skills gaps, growing the employees to reduce the skills gaps, and evaluating these skills and these employees to validate that the entire loop is functioning makes a lot of sense. So, that's the workforce-readiness vision, and that's what we implement at Veolia or Infinite Campus.
But on top of these first two I named, we've signed some really, really amazing contracts together with Docebo, so with a major European telco company, with an automotive company in Germany. Really big companies are really seeing the value of this combination. And there is an additional area where the market demand is really high on the extended workforce. And you know, the workforce is more and more extended with partners, freelancers, subcontractors, even customers can be part of the community and helping you design or build your product. And Docebo has always been the number one in this learning use case, how to train external workforce. There's a real need for skills management in this extended workforce and the workforce readiness of this extended workforce is really a business matter, because if you enable and upscale and monitor really precisely the capabilities of your network of hundreds or thousands of partners, then you just smash it on the market, on the business, because indirectly, they will be better, and you will select them better.
So, this extended workforce readiness is a key success factor. And we invest a lot on this use case, particularly with the Docebo customers who run this use case at scale.
[14:43] David Green: Very good, very helpful. And I imagine when you, builds skills and learning together, that gives you an opportunity to re-evaluate what you measure. So, what changes? Instead of things like courses completed or skills catalogued or what percentage of the organisation have you captured skills on, what should leaders be looking to measure to understand whether workforce capability is actually improving, because ultimately, that's what it's about, isn't it?
[15:14] Loïc Michel: Yeah, exactly. So, the three pillars or the three components of this workforce-readiness loop: one detection, or call it detect; two, grow; and third, assess or validate. So, you're exactly right. It's not validating or assessing that the learning or the upskilling activity was done, but assessing whether you close the gap or not at the individual level, at the team level, and at the org level. So, doing this can be done by many ways. It's funny because we came in the story with our own ways of assessing, with AI, inferring the capability level of any employee based on what they actually do or how they describe their project, the interaction they have with other colleagues. That's the kind of thing we can infer and detect. But then, self-assessment, peer assessment, manager assessment on a situation, you need all of these factors. At the same time, Docebo already had their ways of assessing, so particularly with partners that do some assessment quiz or test, or there can be hard skills or soft skills, and you have different ways of assessing them.
But when you combine all these quizzes, tests, role plays, they have role plays, AI role plays, plus self-assessment, peer assessment, 360 kind of assessment plus AI inference, you have really good signals whether the skills have been evolving in a good direction or not, and whether the individual is more capable of doing his current job or the next one or the one in five years, based on his career or a career plan. And you have a better view on whether your company is upskilling globally on, let's say, AI project management or agentic AI workforce management, which is a new area as well. So, assessment is definitely redefined. The good news is there is no one answer, and it's a combination of different ways of doing it that makes sense. And it's key in this workforce-readiness loop as well.
[17:37] David Green: Really, really helpful. And let's continue kind of on that vein. I know one thing that you've written about, Loïc, is the gap between skills visibility and skills execution. It's one thing to know what skills you've got, it's another to actually deliver work and execute on those skills. Now, many, many organisations, and we've had several conversations on the podcast over the years, have invested heavily in taxonomies and skills inventories, but they still struggle to use that data, that workforce, that skills intelligence, as you call it, in everyday decisions. Why do so many skills initiatives fail or stall at just the mapping stage, which as you said, is just the start, that's just a detection piece, isn't it?
[18:23] Loïc Michel: Yeah. It's always the same story. If you don't have any business challenge to solve, do not do anything like that. If everything is running fine, do your thing, forget about it. It means that whatever your workforce is, apparently it works. So, the workforce is capable of delivering the business expectations, that's cool. If it's not the case, then you have a business challenge to solve. And then, maybe with the skills approach, you would be more capable of solving this challenge. And that's the entry point. And if you are missing that or losing that perspective while navigating the skills transformation, then at some point you will say, "Oh yeah, we have these capabilities, but okay, we don't know what to do with that info". And then, the board is coming and saying, "Hey, okay, but how does it solve my staffing challenge in this region? Or will that help me hire faster in this other region? Or what can I do when I have 50% of my employees retiring with critical skills in that field?" If it's disconnected and if the skills-based approach was not the answer to these questions, then you will never find the connection, and then it will stay where it is.
So, what it requires, I would say, is probably a strong governance, but embodied by a strong vision, courage, leadership and execution capabilities. So, it's often a strong HR leadership that is required for that. The CHRO, for example, needs to be all in and connecting this skills approach with the business challenges he's working on with the rest of the execs. And this governance and this motion is different from Crédit Agricole to SocGen to Orange, but there's always this strong leader somewhere saying, "We know why we are doing it", and it's probably not the answer to all of your business challenges, but it answers a lot. And yes, the skills approach is a solution to many of the board headaches. So, I think that's essential.
[20:45] David Green: Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, I hear this from both from practitioners and companies like 365Talents really, and you've got to connect it to a business challenge or a business opportunity. It can't be an HR vanity project. And I think that's where we see skills initiatives fail. And it's quite a lot of work, isn't it? And yes, the benefits can be significant. But you've got to connect it to a business opportunity.
[21:17] Loïc Michel: Absolutely.
[21:18] David Green: And Loïc, I mean obviously, again, you may not be able to individualise this to companies. What are some of the typical business challenges that you see organisations have when they develop this skills capability and this skills intelligence, and it helps them solve those problems? Just for companies that are maybe struggling a little bit in this area, what are some of the business challenges that companies are solving?
[21:42] Loïc Michel: Yeah, I can name a few. Like, I would say it's all about workforce fluidity and workforce capability to do the job they are supposed to do. So, agility and fluidity is for short term and midterm when you say, "Okay, we need to transform the organisation, so we'll need people to move in the organisation". So, they must be ready to move and develop the good set of skills for that. And for example, reducing the external dependency on external consultants and freelancers, or consultancy companies, services companies, is a really easy gain when you map more dynamically and know more dynamically your resources available internally. So, for example, at SNCF, the railway company in France, they save 100 million a year of subcontractors just by that, and they had 400 million reduced to 300 million yearly, so it's 100 million saved a year, every year. And we can probably go even further. But then, it's operational questions. SocGen, Société Générale, they've been in lots of transformation and internal mobility is serving these transformations. People need to be relocated in different areas the business, they don't hire and recruit anymore, or probably really less than before. So, internal mobility is a critical element. It serves the global strategy of the C-level and the board.
Redeployment of entire areas of the business is also a really critical one, and particularly in an AI world. Some new skills are appearing and you know that your business needs to take these skills and make them widely available in the organisation. So, you need to find where it will bring the best value, identify this population, and then upskill or reskill them on this. But at the same time, you could say, okay, with AI, it's challenging our organisation so much that some new jobs, new roles, new skills will have to be developed on a daily basis, otherwise it will disappear. Like, "Our business will disappear if we don't create this sense of agility and urgency internally. We won't be able even to survive". So, this is critical, it's a matter of life or death in some situation. That's a really critical business challenge, right? So, it can be really global or really more tactical on some particular use cases, and this one on the internal resourcing is providing lots of value.
[24:55] David Green: I want to take a short break from this episode to introduce the Insight222 People Analytics Program, designed for senior leaders to connect, grow, and lead in the evolving world of people analytics. The programme brings together top HR professionals with extensive experience from global companies, offering a unique platform to expand your influence, gain invaluable industry insight and tackle real-world business challenges. As a member, you'll gain access to over 40 in-person and virtual events a year, advisory sessions with seasoned practitioners, as well as insights, ideas and learning to stay up-to-date with best practices and new thinking. Every connection made brings new possibilities to elevate your impact and drive meaningful change. To learn more, head over to insight222.com/program and join our group of global leaders.
And it sounds like, Loïc, ultimately this is serving up skills intelligence to managers, to leaders, to HR business partners, to support conversations they're having with the business, to make more informed decisions around hiring, mobility, learning, use or not of external workforce or consultants, workforce planning. And it just means that, as you talked about, fluidity, agility, speed, these are all things that we're seeing increasingly organisations having to do, and this skills intelligence helped them to move faster and smarter. And you mentioned that great example of SNCF. I mean 100 million of a 400-million budget, that's not only a big saving in numbers, that's a big saving in percentage as well, by having this information at hand. What you see from leaders in the business, so business leaders, managers, how do they become better when they've got this skills intelligence ready for them to make decisions of?
[27:15] Loïc Michel: That's a good question. I think we would be interested in knowing more personally how they do it. We don't have that direct connection with any one of these personas on our platforms. But what we provide them is these dashboards where they can see their teams, see how their teams are progressing on a daily basis, build some career plan with their teams, have some smart career discussions with their teams. In French, it's called entretien professionnel. It's professional career discussions, and it's a regulation around that. You need to have these conversations in EMEA, globally. In several countries in EMEA, these conversations need to happen frequently. If you don't talk skills, you can just talk about futuristic job expectations, but you don't know how to get there, so it's going to be in the air. With skills, they have really more meaningful conversations. And we hear the feedback. We have some NPS on the platform, so we collect that from the employee perspective. And they say that they have more visibility, more frequent conversations. So, that's a role of a manager as well to be able to keep the light on in these career conversations and skills conversations.
I would say, and maybe it's provocative, but nobody likes to do an interview, or an assessment, like appraisals. It's kind of boring. And nobody is expecting to do that because the preparation is complex. And then, you have to use a template and it's pretty boring. And so, what we bring here is a more real-time approach of these conversations. And you always collect the data, so that pretty much this conversation could happen every day or every couple of days. So, it goes again with the seamless experience we want to offer to employees, to individuals, to HR, to managers. So, yeah.
[29:41] David Green: Very good. And we're seeing, AI is increasingly part of that, serving seamless experiences up for managers as well. In the episode we recorded last year, Loïc, you talked a lot around how you're already using agents at 365Talents. So, let's see where we are today, because things have moved on quite a lot in the world. Where do you see agents genuinely improving workforce decisions and workforce experiences today, and where do you think the market is maybe getting ahead of itself if it is getting ahead of itself?
[30:15] Loïc Michel: Yeah, I don't think we are seeing it as big as it will be yet. I think it's definitely going to change lots of things. I was talking with someone at Booking this morning, and this person was telling me that she has been building a team of agents to do something in her team. I didn't ask her what it was, but she said in a conversation, like, "Oh yeah, we have a team of five people in charge of this". No, she didn't say that. She said, "We have several teams. Oh, yes, and we have a team of agents doing something". It's a natural thing to say. Two years ago, we would have probably said she's a witch, and that was too weird to be said. Now, it's there and it's real. So, it was good for us. We had this ambition 12 or 18 months ago, we discussed that. And at Docebo, at the same time, they were really ambitious on this agentic world. And they are really looking at transforming the learning space with agents.
So, together, we are offering what we call an agent hub with predefined agents. And we had our own, they have their own, we have a skills architect coming soon, we have a job architect. We have Prism, it's an AI coach, a career coach for the employees. They have AI role plays. But more importantly, this Agent Hub is a studio to design your own agents, because it's different. And the beauty of this technology is that it's really adaptive, so it's not one size fits all, you can just really adjust it. You need a little bit of expertise. So, it comes with what we call forward-deployed engineers, so AI experts that come that understand your business problems, and they do the configuration or the prompting, and eventually they just set up the thing that executes exactly what you do. Is it curating your content to, I don't know, to remove any particular type of content that you don't want to use anymore? Is it building your learning plan based on the skills gaps identified by your 365 skills engine? These kind of things. So, basically, any HR leader can have a different set of expectations, and every time they will say, "Oh, that would be great to have someone or something doing this for me". Okay, maybe the agent with the data available can do it, so let's build it. And it's not that complex, but you just need additional workforce to help you with that.
So, this FDE approach makes a lot of sense, and we have top customers that are exploring these skills agents studio to develop their own. So, that's an interesting space definitely.
[33:22] David Green: That is an interesting development. And as you said, we're only in the early stages of it at the moment. And things are developing so fast, which we'll talk about in a minute. So, as AI takes on more of the analysis, the matching, human judgment becomes more important, not less important. Where should organisations generally draw the line between recommendations made by technology and decisions that remain with managers, with HR, with employees themselves?
[33:52] Loïc Michel: We've always been asked these questions, because we were bringing AI in an HR world that was untouched by AI for years. We've always been asking this exact question, "Will AI decide for humans?" and where to draw the line? And we've always said the same thing. There will always be a human in the loop, always, because unless the people are getting lobotomised and then they don't have any judgment capability, and then they will, once they are suggested a new job, they will just stand up, open the door, go and do the job without thinking a second; unless this happens, I think it will never happen, there will always be someone in the room to challenge the suggestions and discuss that. It's true for HR managers, for employees. There is always someone deciding. And maybe it's an advice. Hopefully, we will never be in this situation, but I would say the same. Nobody, no individual should rely only on an AI companion for anything. We shouldn't do that for dating, for parenting, for health decisions.
So, that's the same at work. Yes, AI will do a lot of things, but we are still the leader over AI. Maybe we'll discuss that later, for how long are we still the leader against AI? But today we are, and that's a real power we have. So, let's just use it as what it is, suggestions, recommendations, or simplification, automation, and just take decisions on top of that with this info. And yes, it requires not to be brainwashed. And the same, I like to say, same for dating, parenting, and decisions. Like, you could just say, "Oh, AI told me to do that, so I did it". But maybe it's not a good way to do, you know? I was at my daughter's school. The chairman of the school, he gave us a speech of 15 minutes saying, "Be really careful with your kids". We see that more and more. They spend more time talking to their AI companion than to any human. Some of them don't talk to practitioners, to psychologists, to the help provided in school, to their teacher, to their parents, to their friends, to their cousins. They don't talk of their life and what they feel to this human, but just to an AI companion that can just make you do crazy things or think crazy things. So, we have to get used to using the tools, but be critical and challenge that.
[37:07] David Green: Yeah, I like that. I know we use the 'humans in the loop' and I use it as well and I definitely agree with that. I wonder if we should make it 'humans in the lead'? So, yes, obviously we use AI to help us hopefully make better decisions ultimately, and to remove away some of the drudgery from work. But ultimately, we've got to make the decisions. That leads on nicely to this question. Obviously, Loïc, we're recording this at a time where there seems to be an interesting tension emerging around AI. I mean, certainly the last two weeks or so, some of the people building the most advanced systems are calling for greater caution and stronger safeguards. One could just argue they could just get together and agree that amongst themselves, rather than writing letters. But anyway, policymakers are also pushing to accelerate adoption and innovation. I guess they're thinking about the economy and everything else. For business and HR leaders and technology firms, like Docebo and 365Talents, maybe caught between those signals, how should you think about the pace of adoption? And what does responsible governance look like inside an organisation?
[38:19] Loïc Michel: Yeah, good question, because I really see some parallel in between what's going on at the global level governance and what we see in the organisations. And it's always going back and forth, back and forth. When we said earlier that we were the first to introduce AI in HR, it was already a black box for lots of customers and they were really sceptical, if not afraid, of what we were bringing. And some leaders just said, "Okay, give it a go, we see the advantages of this technology". And some others were saying, "Oh, interesting, but we're not ready for that. My workforce and my social representative will just say it's not for us, and they are probably true". Now, seven years after, nobody is saying AI is not a thing, but these two mindsets are still remaining. So, some are still saying, "Okay, let's give it a go. We'll see. Do it". And others will say, "Oh, we have to do it, we have to give it a go, but it's going to be complicated". So, we see different adoption mechanisms.
That's why even this Agentic Hub with forward-deployed engineers is not for everybody. Some top 20 or 30 customers with Docebo want to do it; some others are not ready yet, and we see that, and that's fine, even though I really listen carefully to what the leaders are saying at the global level. And I believe we have to be cautious, not to be just in the loop like a hamster, but more in the lead, like it's what you said. And so, governance should help us make this these decisions. And I mean, maybe it's marketing, but when these leaders, like tech leaders, say, "Hey, I think it's going to be a little bit too fast and too destructive", we should listen to them. So, same with GDPR data protection in large organisations, when the DPO in charge of data protection was saying, "Hey, we need to have guardrails, we need to be careful", there are experts, I think we need to listen to them a little bit. And that's what happened. Governance, GDPR, so everything is done in a particular way.
We don't even have the equivalent for AI. Oh, yes, there is an ISO AI management. We have this certification at 365, it's really good. But the technology goes way further and faster than these certifications, and I think that's the hard part. On data protection, when GDPR was done, data is data. When you know how to manage them, it's fine. AI, you think you know, and it's pushing the barriers. So, it goes further than what you think. And when tech is going further than regulation and faster, that's where it creates some friction, or I would not say revolution, but so it's an interesting question. And we see different ways to manage this question in corporates.
[41:53] David Green: So, Loïc, I think that leads quite nicely. Obviously, we don't necessarily know the answer to this yet, but if we were having this conversation again in maybe one, maybe two years' time, what do you think will have changed around how most organisations understand, develop and deploy skills?
[42:12] Loïc Michel: They will have integrated this agentic approach, both from a capability standpoint and from a solution standpoint. The tech to deal with these skills and learning and upskilling and reskilling and talent use cases will be really agentic. So, what we described earlier with this hub and everything will be the norm. Plus, they will manage some agentic kind of workforce the way I described, like ad booking, we talked about that before. I have a friend who is building an AI-native startup on a mobile app, like autonomous optimisation, leveraging agents, and he's creating his entire company with agents. And he's telling me that most of his time, he's thinking about how to ask questions and challenge his agents to run the company. So, he's not thinking how to hire an intern or how to coach an intern. That's a bit scary, right? But that's his life as a leader, as a builder. He has created and he has 40 different agents doing different things. He has a CFO agent, he has a CMO agent, the CRO agent. One is raising funds and they're doing crazy stuff. And he was telling me, "Most of my time, I am thinking about how to engage with this new workforce, how to ask them, how to brief them, how to question or challenge them, how to maybe sanction them". I don't know. So, that's a bit scary, but that's what it is. And some guys or girls are doing exactly that today.
So, if people are doing it and it does something, he's building a company and now he's raising money, and it's working pretty well. If it works, I mean, any organisation will have to do that, because it's demonstrated that it works, it creates value. So, I think tomorrow, companies will have to work on these skills and task intelligence, integrate agents into these skills gaps analysis. Workforce readiness won't be just internal human, external human, but also agentic workforce. So, it's going to be an interesting landscape. We'll see, in two years, when we do a new episode.
[45:01] David Green: And I think that leads nicely to the question of the series, which actually, I think, ties in very well with what we've been speaking about the last sort of 40 minutes or so. And you're allowed to answer this definitely from a 365Talents perspective, if you want to do that, Loïc. How should HR prepare people, workers for jobs that have not yet been defined?
[45:25] Loïc Michel: Yeah. For sure, taking the skills-based approach is number one. But more importantly, agility is the key. And agility needs to be seen at the individual levels, at the teams level, the org level, the HR team level. Like, even the HR team needs to be more agile and to set the standards and be an example of what it means to be agile, to take new technologies, learn new skills. And the global agility of the workforce has to be true at 100%. And to do that, you need these skills, common language, because that's the currency of this agility. And yes, you are right, tasks, intelligence as well for agents, because not everything is about skills. Some skills help you to do tasks, and some jobs are described as a series of tasks. So, knowing what tasks can be done by agents is key as well. So, jobs, whether they will be the same or will have disappeared, they don't really matter. But a job is a good way to describe yourself when you are in a social group. What do you do? Actually, you don't answer 'task', "I do this, this, this." No, no, that's not the question. I don't care about your everyday life at work. It's just what you do and it's not skills, right? You need to have this comfort zone of a job, this defining who you are as a professional, and we usually use it, so it's still useful. But then, the definition of the job will change or it will disappear, another one will be yours, or you will have to jump on another one.
So, just be agile. And skills and tasks are the minimum elements to be navigating. You need to understand to navigate in this really fluid world. So, that's what I would require my teams to be.
[47:36] David Green: Before I let you go, where can listeners follow your work, and what should they look out next from you, 365Talents and Docebo?
[47:46] Loïc Michel: We are really present online. So, we publish a lot of resources on skills, skills-based transformation, skills toolkit. So, you can download them on our website, on the Docebo website, we share these content and resources. And on top of that, on a more physical, in real-life context, we are running an EMEA city series of events. So, we'll be in Paris, Milan, Berlin, London in October. I'll be in Amsterdam as well for HRcoreNORDIC soon, plus an event we run with a partner, early October. So, if you are somewhere in Europe at some point in October, you'll see me.
[48:35] David Green: Perfect. And I do recommend, I am subscribed to your newsletter. There are, as you said, some really good tools and materials on there and insights. So, I do recommend that people subscribe to that. And we will put the link in the show notes for that as well. We're recording this before UNLEASH, Loïc. I think the episode will go out around the time of UNLEASH, maybe the week after, but I look forward to seeing you at UNLEASH in a few weeks' time.
[49:05] Loïc Michel: Sure.
[49:05] David Green: And thanks so much again for being a guest on the show.
[49:08] Loïc Michel: Pleasure. Thanks a lot.
[49:12] David Green: Loïc, thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to have you on the show. I really enjoyed exploring what bringing skills and learning together could mean for organisations, and how AI is changing the way we understand, develop and deploy workforce capabilities. One point that particularly stayed with me was the importance of assessing whether a skills gap has actually closed. Mapping capabilities and completing learning activities give us useful information, but we also need to know whether people are better equipped to do the work that business needs. That feels like a useful question for any organisation investing in skills. What decision will this help us make, and how will we know it has made a difference?
So, turning to our listeners, I'd love to hear your perspective. Where is skills intelligence making the biggest difference in your organisation and what's helping you move from understanding skills to putting them to work? Come and find my post on this episode on LinkedIn and let me know in the comments. If you'd like to learn more about Loïc's work, 365Talents shares useful resources on skills and skills-based transformation, including practical toolkits you can download for free. I subscribe to their newsletter myself and would recommend it. You'll find the links in the show notes. And if you enjoyed the episode, please share it with a colleague who would find it useful, and subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next. One last thing before we go, if you'd like to keep up with what we're working on at Insight222, follow us on LinkedIn or head to insight222.com. You can also sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter for the latest thinking on HR, people analytics, and workforce transformation. Right, that's all for today. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back next week with another episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Until then, take care and stay well.
